


Scarf

by pyromanicofthesea



Series: A Pridecember Winter Wonderland [7]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Gift anxiety, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:01:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28061340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyromanicofthesea/pseuds/pyromanicofthesea
Summary: Sometimes gifts don't go as planned.
Relationships: Kaiba Seto/Yami Yuugi
Series: A Pridecember Winter Wonderland [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2055513
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Scarf

The Other Yugi paced the floor of Yugi's room for the thousandth time, and Yugi was certain there would be wear marks in the carpet despite his Other Self being incorporeal at the moment. The amount of anxiety that sat in their bond - despite how much they filtered their feelings for each other's sake - was beginning to get overwhelming. The Other Yugi had been like this for the better part of the past hour.

"I still don't know what to get him!" The Other Yugi didn't cease his pacing as he spoke. He only through his hands into the air, his animated worrying doing nothing to actually dispel any nervous energy he had. "I've brainstormed so many ideas, but none will get the message across to him!"

"I don't know, I'm pretty sure a personalized heart ornament spells out 'I have romantic interest in you' pretty clearly," Yugi said from where he laid on his bed.

"Does Seto celebrate Christmas? Would he have a tree to put the ornament on? Would it be too sentimental and he'd hate it?"

"Other Me."

The pacing did not stop as the Other Yugi rattled off other potential negative outcomes of varying degrees of realistic.

" _Other Me._ " Yugi said with far more demand for attention. His eyes met the semi-opaque eyes of his Other Self. "He is obsessed with you. You could hand him a rock, say it made you think of him, and he'd never let it go."

"Aibou, you know he wouldn't," the Other Yugi shook his head. There was a smile on his face, so Yugi considered his statement a successful distraction from his Other Self's distressed thoughts.

"Maybe not with a rock, but you do mean a lot to him," Yugi said. He turned to look up at his ceiling again, and then the thought struck him. He sat up with a jolt, his eyes devious with an idea as he addressed his Other Self again. "You should make him something."

"What do I make the man who can buy half the world?" The pacing did not cease.

"Something practical." The pacing ceased.

The Other Yugi met his partner's eyes, frozen mid-step, as the realization hit him. "A scarf. I'm knitting him a scarf!"

"We don't know how to knit."

"We can learn!" The Other Yugi ran to the bed and jumped onto it in his excitement, landing beside Yugi and narrowly avoding landing _on_ Yugi. "Aibou, do we have time to go to the library and the craft store? I need to get books and supplies."

Knitting was harder than the Other Yugi anticipated. Despite the book's recommendation to not unravel first projects and disrupt the joy of completing, he had restarted the scarf four times now. The needles weren't awkward in his hands or anything, and he was careful to keep track of his stitches, but somehow a stitch would drop, or add, or just get very messy as the yard frayed, and he couldn't stand it. He didn't expect perfection - knitting wasn't gaming, after all - but he didn't think there would be this steep of a learning curve!

He looped the starting line onto the knitting needle for the fifth time. He knew the pattern after reading the scarf section of his instruction book so many times. Knit one, purl one, knit two, end line, purl one, knit three, purl one, next line. Over and over until binding off 'in row', whatever that meant. He didn't know, but he figured he could find out when he got there.

His knitting went well for about half an hour, and then suddenly it wasn't going well. A stitch dropped somehow. The Other Yugi spread the scarf-in-progress out, trying to find where he went wrong. He flipped through the book, looking up how to add a stitch. He read the instructions over twice, performed the instructions with slow care, and somehow now his line had one too many stitches. The Other Yugi frowned. How did that happen? He was certain he lost a stitch, and certain he only added one, but now there was one too many.

"I think this yarn hates me," he muttered. He decided to keep going this time, knitting and purling and knitting and purling until somehow another stitch added itself into the row.

The Other Yugi frowned at the scarf as it betrayed him once again. With a sigh, he kept going, following the book's insistence to not restart first projects unless absolutely necessary.

He restarted the scarf for the fifth time after another twenty minutes of frustrated knitting. Ten minutes later, an alarm on his phone chimed, and he had to stop for the time being so Yugi could keep the plans he made. The Other Yugi hid his scarf project in the bottom drawer of the nightstand, and called Yugi out from his soulroom.

"I'm not feeling well, aibou, I think I'd like to stay in for the night," the Other Yugi said as Yugi applied his eyeliner, preparing for the winter celebration he was hosting that evening.

Yugi's hand stilled, his eyes meeting his Other Self's in the mirror. "You've been quiet all week. Do you want to talk about it?"

"After the party," the Other Yugi said. Yugi didn't push him any further, but the worry he held was unmistakable.

When the party guests arrived, they were greeted by Yugi dressed in the ugliest sweater imaginable. A checkered pattern alternating black and purple served as the background to a little Dark Magician, who wore a red hood instead of its usual purple and black magician's hood and held a candy cane instead of its staff. It was horrible, the epitome of disgrace for Yugi's signature card, and he wore his sweater with a great deal of pride.

Each guest had some sort of reaction, some more up front than others. Anzu held back her laughter as politely as possible, but Jounouchi's reaction killed her composure in cold blood. Yugi drank up the laughter and insults to the sweater like a jester receiving an encore. Honda wasn't much better than Jounouchi, but he at least gave a respectable 'hah, nice' while laughing. Otogi asked where to buy one, which prompted Yugi to proudly hand over the website he ordered the hideous thing from. Mai declared with a bit of electrical work, she could make one even worse, and the suggestion set stars in Yugi's eyes. The stars were still there when Kaiba arrived, so the quiet man was greeted by a Yugi with the energy of a caffeinated squirrel.

"Notice anything different?" Yugi asked, doing a little spin in place to show off the sweater after he and Kaiba said their mutual hellos.

"Only that your outfit matches your personality much better now," Kaiba said with a slight upturn at the corner of his lips.

Yugi gave him a halfhearted shove. "You're so cruel to me!" he said with a laugh. He stepped aside so Kaiba could step in.

"If you bought me one of those, I'm not apologizing for my cruelty," he said as he slipped off his shoes.

"And if I didn't buy you one?"

"Then I'll apologize."

There was a small period of silence between the two before Yugi spoke again, keeping his voice low so his voice wouldn't carry through the hall where someone else may overhear. "My Other Self wasn't feeling well, so it's just me tonight," he said. "If you don't want to stay, I won't hold it against you."

"Is he alright?"

Kaiba's avoidance of Yugi's second statement didn't go unnoticed, but Yugi wasn't about to mention it during one of the few times he heard Kaiba explicitly express concern for someone else. "I think so. Something's stressing him out, I can feel it. But he won't tell me. We haven't been talking much, actually. He's been working on a gift for you."

"I didn't need anything," Kaiba said, but he couldn't help be curious. He knew the Other Yugi and Yugi were close, closer than he could really understand, so to know that the Other Yugi was spending time doing something that didn't somehow involve Yugi caught his attention. What could possibly be so special about a party gift that it required a noticeable amount of time to work on?

"That's usually how gifts work," Yugi said with a laugh. "I'll go get it before you go. It's just upstairs." Kaiba nodded, and Yugi headed up the stairs to his room.

His room was as organized as it could be. Meaning that, it wasn't very organized at all, but at least the only things on the floor were a couple days-old shirts and a pair of pants. He didn't have many hiding places.

Yugi opened his desk drawers, checked his closet, his bookshelf, his gaming shelf, behind and under his bed, but didn't find where his Other Self kept his knitting project until he ended up at his night stand, the last place he decided he would look before trying to ask his Other Self.

Inside the night stand was a crumpled pile of knitted yarn, and Yugi assumed that must be the scarf. He didn't bother to open the folded project, he just grabbed it out of the drawer and headed back downstairs. Kaiba still waited at the door, and looked up at him as he came down the stairs.

"Sorry it took so long, my Other Self hides his projects really well," Yugi said as he rubbed the back of his neck. He held out the folded scarf, and Kaiba took it with more care than he was expecting.

The yarn was soft in Kaiba's hands. It felt like he held a plush cloud, fluffly and light. He unfolded the gift to reveal rows of knits and purls that could only be the intention of the scarf, but it was difficult to tell from the craftsmanship. Stitches were missing all over, some sections stretched and some stitches split where the needles sneaked through part of a loop without being noticed until further down the rows. While the yarn itself was a beautiful mix of grey-blue and a silvered white, the scarf was nothing more than an eyesore.

Yugi felt his heart drop when Kaiba unfolded it. No wonder his Other Self was upset, he had spent most of his spare moments for over the past week trying to make a nice scarf for Kaiba and the fruits of his efforts were for naught. The more Kaiba examined the scarf, wordless, expressionless, the more Yugi regretted mentioning the gift at all, let alone bringing it down from his room. Until Kaiba looped the scarf around his neck.

"Please tell him I said 'thanks'. I'll stay for a bit," Kaiba said. He walked away without another word, leaving Yugi to stand in the foyer stunned and confused by what just happened.

"Hey Kaiba, ain't it too warm to be wearing a scarf in here?" Yugi heard Jounouchi's voice carry through the hall. He couldn't hear Kaiba's reply, but judging by Jounouchi's offended 'hey!' and the group's laughter that followed, he knew it must have been some sort of biting remark.

The chime of Yugi's phone pierced the air the afternoon following the houseparty. Yugi, far too tired to really answer the phone, just groaned and turned away from the ring. He felt the world around him begin to fade into a liquid nothingness.

The Other Yugi opened his eyes just as the phone stopped ringing. He sat up and checked to see who had called, but another call came in just as he grabbed the phone.

"Hello?" he answered, not having time to check the caller ID and hoping he answered similarly enough to Yugi in case the call was family.

"Yugi, finally you answer!" Mokuba's voice was loud through the speakers, and the Other Yugi had to hold the phone away from his ear to recover from the audio assault. "You gave Seto that scarf, didn't you? He won't take it off!"

Scarf? The Other Yugi didn't say anything, thinking of what scarf Yugi could have given Kaiba. The realization hit the Other Yugi like a train. He reached down and opened the bottom drawer of the night stand. His failed scarf was gone.

"Mokuba-" the Other Yugi began, but Mokuba quickly cut him off.

"Look, I'm sorry for yelling, nii-sama really likes the gift and I'm sure he didn't say that last night but, did you really have to get him something he'd like _that_ much? He was almost late for work this morning because it fell off in his sleep and he couldn't find it."

"He slept with a scarf on? That's dangerous!" he said on impulse. What if Kaiba had strangled himself?

"I know! I know. I told him not to wear it to bed, and he won't. He scoffed but I know he won't anymore since I said something." There was a pause on the line. "I gotta go, I'm at the office right now. I'll tell nii-sama you said hi!"

"Oh, uh, yeah, thanks Mokuba," the Other Yugi managed to get in just before the call ended. He couldn't help the stunned grin that spread across his face once the contents of the call actually settled. Kaiba liked his scarf. He was fully awake and bouncing with energy now, even if his aibou wasn't a morning person by any means. The Other Yugi's elated joy overpowered Yugi's disdain for early mornings. And best of all, Kaiba liked his scarf.

**Author's Note:**

> knitting is hard. I can only knit hats.
> 
> Thank you, Kevlar, for proofreading this one <3  
> And thank YOU for reading!!


End file.
